Mic and speaker muting

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

I am on a quest that reminds me how old and out of date I am.

Simple challenge: I have a voice-over studio. Internal sound card in computer was either in RECORD or in PLAYBACK mode. Click RECORD and talk. Click PLAY and listen.]

Upgrade to external USB sound to digital and digital back to analog device. All circuits always LIVE. Must turn one volume control up and one control down each time I go from PLAYBACK to RECORD mode.

I set about to prove what great intellect I am with soldering skills. Yeah, right! Can't buy a "lever switch" or as I have heard them called.... "telephone KEY switch". Electronics supply house guy says: "You need to go solid state. Get some logic boxes and do it solid state."

I have done a quick search of the Internet and I guess I am the only fool in the world who wants to do this. Any one have some hints to share? Can you point me to a schematic somewhere that would give me a shopping list of the logic devices I need?

And I thought this would be so simple. ;D

 

[Lazy J]

It sounds like you're trying to fix a software problem with hardware. What USB soundcard is it? Almost all sound cards will let you mute the input lines on your playback mixer. I know in Windows you might have to actually enable the line in (in the playback mixer menu) and then you have the option to mute it. If the line in isn't enabled, it won't even show up in the windows mixer.

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

Ooooooooh!!! The mystery deepens.

The device is a PreSonus AudioBox 22VSL.

I may have solved the problem and don't even know when or how I did it!

I began a response where I was going to tell you how many mouse-clicks I would have to make to mute mics, mute speakers and remember what order to do them. No, no, no. I can sit here and turn the input gain up and down and turn the output gain up and down, but I wanted to avoid that. You never get them consistently back where they were. So I fired up Adobe Audition to see if there was a combination of mouse-clicks of mutes and enables that would do the trick... and found that somehow my new device in mimicing the M-Audio internal board I am replacing. As of right now there is no output to the speakers from the mic input... only from the play-back. I have been playing with this thing for two weeks and this is new behavior as of this afternoon.

Curious minds have to know! They say curiosity killed the cat. I don't scare easily. I've been wondering for years what the cat was curious about.

After I send this I am going to reboot the computer which should kill any temporary settings I may have clicked without knowing or remembering and see if the device returns to it's original behavior.

Why the change? My pre-amp mixer seemed to do well but I had doubts about it's frequency response, and even more doubts about it's internal noise level. And some doubts about the M-Audio sound card's internal noise level. This box gets the audio conversion to digital outside the computer case (away from the electrical hash that floats around in there.) My needs are simple: normally one mic. Occasionally I might go on-site and use two mics. This new box means I can grab the Netbook computer and the the box and do on-site recordings with the same technical quality I do here in my voice-over studio.

By the way: I am using Windows 7 and there is no Windows RECORD mixer so going there was not going to be an answer to what I am trying to make happen.

With fingers crossed, I shall reboot and see if whatever changed.... survives.

 

[Lazy J]

The steps would be similar with Win 7. Assuming it uses the windows mixer, just right click on the speaker in the bottom right by the clock. Click PLAYBACK devices and see what is listed. You *might* see some type of "PreSonus Input 1" listed. You would want to disable that in the PLAYBACK list only, because you don't want the input going directly to the output. You might also see a "Stereo Mix" listed and that would need to be disabled.

Other than that, PreSonus has it's own mixer software on their website and you might have to do a similar settings change in its software.

Just trying to save you the circuit building effort.

 

[Boardengineer12]

I am on a quest that reminds me how old and out of date I am.

Simple challenge: I have a voice-over studio. Internal sound card in computer was either in RECORD or in PLAYBACK mode. Click RECORD and talk. Click PLAY and listen.]

Upgrade to external USB sound to digital and digital back to analog device. All circuits always LIVE. Must turn one volume control up and one control down each time I go from PLAYBACK to RECORD mode.

I set about to prove what great intellect I am with soldering skills. Yeah, right! Can't buy a "lever switch" or as I have heard them called.... "telephone KEY switch". Electronics supply house guy says: "You need to go solid state. Get some logic boxes and do it solid state."

I have done a quick search of the Internet and I guess I am the only fool in the world who wants to do this. Any one have some hints to share? Can you point me to a schematic somewhere that would give me a shopping list of the logic devices I need?

And I thought this would be so simple. ;D

Its quite simple; all you need is a nail and a spring.

If you want to go with the telephone key switch, hit me up with an email; I think i might be able to help you out.

[email protected]

 

[kenglish]

Look at the stuff from Radio Design Labs (makers of those little modular doo-hickies we all love and use).
With a little imagination, you could come up with several different solutions...most may require just cutting and stripping some wires, and some pre-made cables from Radio Shack. And a "greenie" screwdriver, of course.